Fallout: Equestria - Reclamation Day

Chapter Eight: Revelation

Darkness flooded the shadowy nooks and crannies that our PipBuck lights just couldn’t reach as we traversed down the stairs. As was expected, the offices above ground held no real information on any of the terminals that were still functioning. Company memos, messages about their kids, and more were stored on those, but nothing concrete. Nothing that we needed.

No, Stable Tec didn’t keep all of its secrets out in the open like that. It had never been their style. The hard data, if it existed, would be below ground. It would be inside whatever mock Stable they’d built below the office. Of course there was a mock Stable. Every Stable Tec office in Equestria had one, granted they were unfinished tunnels that led exactly nowhere usually and nothing more than an Atrium and an Overseer’s Office to show the public just what they were paying for. There was probably even a tour robot of some sort. I’d read all about them in some of the magazines I’d found over the years.

My hunches were rewarded when we reached the end of the stairwell. A large cavern opened up around us, a massive steel door swung open from the entrance to the Stable. There was no number on it, of course there wouldn’t be. This wasn’t an official Stable so it would have no number. The air down here felt very stale, rotten almost. There was a sense of futility to all of this. What if there was nothing down here?

Or… what if you find exactly what you’re looking for, I thought grimly. The Overmare had insinuated she was looking for something within the city. I didn’t expect to find that something within a mere couple of days of being out of contact with her, but I did hope to find something that would tell me more about Stable 76. Maybe, if there was a clue here, I could figure out what the Overmare wanted.

“I don’t see any movement. Looks like the security systems are all disabled,” Comet Tail said gruffly. “That scares me more than the security system being live.”

I grimaced, nodding. No security system meant that this place had likely been accessed before we came down here. If that was the case, logic suggested whoever had done so might not have left. I instinctively pulled up my E.F.S. and scanned as best as I could for any hostiles. No red, nothing. I relayed this info to Comet.

“Could be deserted,” he grunted. “Never did believe those stupid computers. Just be on your guard.”

We moved silently through the Stable door, staying as silent as we could be walking along corrugated metal. Just inside the door was the Stable entry, a foyer of sorts. Off to one side was the Stable security station. The door was locked. Looking inside the window revealed that there was a terminal and a safe inside. I scowled.

“Got anything for picking locks?” I asked the group.

Comet Tail nodded, lifting a lock pick in his magic. He inserted the pick and worked on it until a satisfying click sounded from the door. He pushed open the door. “After you,” he said, waving a hoof.

I walked into the office and moved to the terminal. It was super easy to crack the password, barely an inconvenience, considering that the password amounted to 12345. The terminal held the open function for the safe, so I moved to that first. After that, I realized that there was a map of the facility we were in. It didn’t amount to much. Beyond the main Stable foyer was a mock Atrium, an Overseer’s office, and a sample Resident Quarters. The next level down held a mock Reactor core and Engineering department.

I downloaded the map to my PipBuck and tried to see if there was anything else of use on the terminal, locating a set of announcements about the Stable Tec offices, as well as a set of internal memos regarding customer etiquette standards. Apparently the receptionists at this location had an issue with customer service.

Beyond that however, there wasn’t anything else of use. I had to hope we’d find something deeper in the Overseer’s Office.

I stood and walked over to the safe, pulling it open. At the very least there was some ammo. Not much, but something. There were also a metric fuck ton of product brochures for Stables, which seemed utterly useless now. Selling a Stable to who? The thought of it made me chuckle.

“Anything of value?” Apple Tart asked as I exited the office. I shook my head in response.

“Not unless you want to learn about how to handle irate customers,” I said with a snort. “But I did find a map at least and some ammo. There’s an Overseer’s Office set just off the main Atrium.”

“Let’s move out carefully,” Sunny said. “We don’t know yet if we’re alone.”

We continued on, moving from the foyer into the Stable Atrium. It appeared to be quite a large Atrium for a Stable, filled with product displays and models showing the best of the best of Stable life. It was essentially a museum of sorts. Large signs on the walls pointed arrows to the various other sections of the Stable, from the Resident Quarter to the Reactor section. It was otherwise, completely dead. Nothing moved. There weren't even any skeletons. It was simply… clean.

“Well, I guess I expected something a little bit harder,” Taps said.

“Yeah…” I said. “But if they only used this place for promotional purposes I guess it makes sense for it to not have much security. Nothing here works. Which means…”

“Which means that we’re probably wasting our time here aren’t we?” Apple Tart said.

I sighed and nodded. “Let’s see what the Overseer’s Office has in store,” I said.

We moved quietly across the Atrium. Display photos of smiling ponies living Stable life looked back at us. Knowing what I knew about the Stable projects, none of this was realistic. Ponies didn’t live good full lives in Stables. Stables killed them. Stable Tec wasn’t a savior, they were just as bad as the ponies before the war.

The Overseer’s Office was just as bare as the foyer and the security office. Somepony in a hurry must have really cleaned things out. Still, the Overseer’s terminal was intact, and the set of lockers along the wall turned up several Stable jumpsuits and a health kit. I moved to the terminal and started trying to break into its security.

After several long moments of silence I was into the terminal. The password ended up being Chicken, which I found sort of amusing.

There was a single audio recording on the terminal and nothing else. I found this interesting, as there would have to be more, right? A dark thought in my mind told me that we had come all this way for nothing. I pushed play on the audio recording. A scratchy voice flooded the room as we all listened.

“So… it happened after all. Fuck it all. We were so fucking stupid to think that we’d be saving anypony. Even Stable 76, which was supposed to be a repopulation effort, won’t really save anypony in the grand scheme of things.

No… we really fucked it all up. The world died and only those chosen few to make it into the Stables are going to be okay. The rest of us? We’re all dead soon. The megaspells are coming.

But… but maybe Stable 76 can change that. You see, we told the public that the Stable would open roughly twenty years after, that it would be up to the Stable to repopulate, to assess the state of Equestria.

We lied. We had to. If the Zebra ever figured out what kind of technology we were building down there, they’d have hit us even harder in that area. I shouldn’t be telling anyone this, but at this point I don’t really give a fuck, since I’m going to be dead in a few minutes, maybe even an hour, I’m not really sure.

What’s down there is nothing short of the most amazing magical technology that money could buy. It’s essentially a device intended to launch a pony’s consciousness through time itself. Very similar to a spell developed by Starswirl the Bearded himself. The principles on which this functions will allow a pony utilizing the pod to transfer their conscious thought backwards or forwards in time into a different body. The arcano-scientists tell me that it’s completely safe, merely overriding the host consciousness temporarily. A small sacrifice to make for what this project will achieve.

If this works, we have a way to send a pony back to the beginning of all of this. To warn us, to guide us in the right direction by taking the host of a very important pony. Twilight Sparkle, probably. She always was one of the best of us… until the war that is. Before then, she was very influential. Memory Lane will be the most important technology we could have ever achieved. It will single hoofedly stop the war.

I just hope we’re not too late to make it work.”

My jaw dropped as the audio cut out abruptly. If Memory Lane did what that mare had said it did, then I wasn’t just in some computer simulation. I was temporarily suppressing Cherry Blossom’s host consciousness. My mind had gone back in time.

“What the fuck?” Sunny said. “Did she just say what I thought she just said?”

“That’s what the Overmare is after,” I said matter-of-fact. “She wants to use Memory Lane for something important. She’s trying to change the future somehow, but her first attempt didn’t work. There’s something missing, something she needs to make it fully functional.”

“What exactly happens if she can change the future?” Apple Tart asked.

“She could go back in time, use it to change things, accelerate the war or make it worse,” Comet Tail said. “While putting herself in a place of power to do so. All she has to do is put herself into the body of an important pony, like one of the Princesses.”

My eyes widened. “She must have made it work somehow. Otherwise how would I be here?” I said.

“You mean… you used Memory Lane?” Taps said.

“In the future. I came back into the body of Cherry, but why? Why is Cherry important?” I said. “More importantly, if she managed to make it work then why hasn’t she changed things yet?”

“Something happened,” Apple Tart posited. “Something that she wasn’t expecting.”

I grimaced. That had to be the answer. Something had gone wrong with the Overmare’s plans, but how did Cherry figure into the picture? The times I’d used the machine had dropped me right back into Cherry’s body, and right specifically at the time before we left the Stable. There was something significant about that fact, but what was it?

I was at an impasse with where to go next, and time was running out. The Overmare was looking for something, and soon more Stable residents would be in the city, under the pretenses of colonizing it. She would find what she was looking for through one of those groups sooner or later. Whatever it was, I needed to find it first.

“Well, we’ve got a real problem here,” I said, explaining my thought process to the others. “We have no more leads than this. No idea of where to go next.”

“Actually… I might have something of an idea,” Comet Tail grunted. “What’s the one thing that ponies needed to make great change in the world?”

“Weapons,” Sunny said without missing a beat.

“And what kind of weapon would make the biggest change?” Comet asked.

Fuck, I thought to myself. Fuck fuck fuck fuck!

“A megaspell,” I said.

* * *

Dark had fallen by the time we made our way back up out of the mock Stable. There seemed to be nothing else of value inside the Stable-Tec offices. It had to have been looted much earlier before this, possibly by those ponies fleeing the offices on that fateful day at the end of the War.

We’d managed to hash together a loose plan that involved making our way down below the city. If there was any sort of facility that would house a megaspell device, it would have to be below ground. That involved finding a way to get below ground in the first place. Already I’d seen enough of this city that I wished I could just get away for good and forget this place, but I was stuck and needed to see this thing through. Whatever this device was, it couldn’t be used for the ill of future generations.

The city felt eerie at night still, like something was out there watching our every move. Comet Tail led point, weaving through the streets silently as can be. It still made me very uneasy. The darkness in this place was alive, and it knew we were on our own. It was only a matter of time before it came to collect.

There was a measure of comfort to find in having Apple Tart, Sunny, and Taps nearby. The small part of me that was still Cherry Blossom felt as if I had known those ponies for a very long time, and I trusted them, especially Apple Tart. Even if the darkness came, I felt as though I could face it with them by my side.

I didn’t yet know how to figure out Comet Tail. He seemed surprisingly intelligent and adept at many things, and was ultimately incredibly confident in his own ability. I wasn’t sure how exactly to feel about that. I’d known many ghouls in my time as the head of the MMMM, and Comet was certainly no different in demeanor, but there was something about him that I couldn’t yet place a hoof on.

The plaza ahead of us was an old transport hub, a former center of bustling activity for prewar ponies. Many of the magical rail lines went underground and there had to be some sort of control technician center for the repair and maintenance ponies that worked on them. At least maybe we could get some idea of where something like that would be stored, if it even existed at all. The mere possibility of such a thing frightened me. I wondered briefly if the reason that I had never heard of this particular city in these parts was because the device actually did go off.

I worried that these ponies I had become friends with had never carried on their lines. I knew deep down that they were all long dead, but I still felt resolved to save them.

All the lanes leading into the transport hub were filled with debris from either rail cars or skywagons, making it difficult to maneuver into the actual hub. Furthermore, it seemed as if there was movement on the other sides of these. I scowled as I peered through my scope from behind a bunch of debris.

“There’s ponies or something in there,” I said. “What do we do?”

“Maybe they’re friendly?” Apple Tart offered. “Maybe we just go up and say hi?”

“And probably get shot for our efforts,” Sunny snorted. “They might think we’re there to take whatever they have.”

“I kind of agree with Sunny,” Taps said. “It could go wrong fast. We need to be careful.”

I grimaced. They were right. All my years of training from my mother kicked in hard. There was something not adding up alright with all of this. Was the Overmare’s ponies already here? Were we too late? I moved to ask Comet Tail, my eyes widening as I realized he was no longer with us.

“Uhh… where did the ghoul go?” Sunny said, realizing it at the same time as I had apparently.

“Right here,” a soft voice replied before I could do anything else. “Don’t move. I don’t want to have to shoot you. I’ve seen what you’re capable of. We have you surrounded.”

I heard the faint clicking sound of firearms being cocked. We were indeed surrounded by several ponies… or rather several ghouls. Comet Tail stood in front of the group, levitating a gun.

“What the actual fuck?” I asked angrily, staring coldly at the unicorn ghoul. “We helped you, you helped us, and now you fucking turn on us?”

“Sorry, kid. Don’t get me wrong. I like you, but it’s business. You have the tech we need,” he said, pointing at the PipBuck on my foreleg. “It’s pretty simple really. You help us, you stay alive.”

“Help you with what?” Apple Tart said.

“Get into the bunker where the megaspell is being kept, of course,” Comet Tail said, his eyes burning into my very soul.

I scowled and looked down at my hooves.

“Fuck.”

Author's Note

Kind of a short chapter here, but just trying to move the story along. Going to really try to get this finished in the next year here, so that it is at least done.